School for Sex

Scrubbers from the scrubs go to work for a gentleman of reduced means who’s learned it all from his many thieving wives.

The girls are innocent, done up by an acid-pedlar, for example, “that swine”.

A drunken duchess and the pugilist of former days who wants to be her paramour assist in the training.

“Lovely lolly” is the attraction for a probation officer named Clapp who supplies the girls to Wingate Manor Finishing School, “exclusive”.

The village squire, despoiled of millions, thus gets his own back.

Bishops and viscounts and sheiks send their daughters. Police raid the joint as an “immoral house”.

The judge knows a good thing when he sees one.

Cool It, Carol!

A work of genius on the rise to success and fame and fortune in London for a couple of kids down the motorway.

Die Screaming Marianne

A superb analytical masterpiece on a certain nexus or constellation, the crooked judge, the go-go girl, the half-sister, the best man and so forth, on two planes at once, Britain and Portugal.

Halliwell’s Film Guide takes no notice of Walker’s films, the director probably returns the compliment.

Four Dimensions of Greta

“Is she—has she been murdered?”

“I hope not.”

“You must be a real journalist,” Der Stein. Ruthless exploiter of foreign girls in Notting Hill Gate is our Greta Gruber of Deutschland, according to one account, she flicks her lengthy cigarette holder at the 3D camera (cf. Val Guest’s Au Pair Girls)...

London nudes, a case of back-alley double-parking. A further account has her a charming exotic dancer shopped to the police by a proprietor’s lust (cf. Ken Hughes’ The Small World of Sammy Lee)...

“She was, er, an au pair in Maida Vale.”

“Golders Green. Mrs. Marks.”

“Oh that’s right, yeah. She was hard done by, so she quit. Then she was conned into stripping.” The footballer and the masseuse at dinner (cf. Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones), the kiss from Arch Oboler’s Bwana Devil...

“I’m a Frankfurter Zeitung man myself.” The gambling hell proprietor and the masseuse from Berlin, or how the footballer broke his arm... The witness sequestered on a houseboat, “this is just like a very cheap British sex movie.”

A romantic slow-motion night-on-London-town montage gives the director dessert in the face.

The Flesh and Blood Show

The theme is constantly adumbrated from O’Neill, the Shakespeare cult, against the living creation symbolized by the improvisational troupe’s dancing cavemen, condemned revolutionary, the “witchcraft” scene, and the piece that opens their revue, “Birth of an Idea”.

These points will no doubt have been lost on critics, they are so subliminally made and seeming against all logic, but that is a conscious part of Walker’s originality, to run counter very simply to certain received ideas, cinematic and otherwise.

Frightmare

Mater has an uncontrollable urge for the forbidden fruit, you see, and Pater loves her so.

Walker’s Adam and Eve no institution can quite remedy.

The premise is partly set up from Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace, a neat analysis.

Ferreri’s La Grande bouffe is the interrupted spectacle.

Time Out Film Guide, despite the plug, had no grasp of it.

House Of Mortal Sin

A demented priest goes to town on his parishioners, and even kills his own mother.

And there is no end of it, he desires the girl as the credits close, she resembles the girl he was forbidden thirty years ago.

And so, a greatly analytical work of genius on the wolf in sheep’s clothing, whited sepulchers and all that.

Naturally, Bergman has all this very fine in Fanny and Alexander, followed by Russell in Crimes of Passion.

Schizo

The double structure is mirrored in the Hitchcock feint (Psycho, the delayed honeymoon) that finally establishes Marnie as the basis for the film.

Time Out Film Guide scarcely took note of this.

The Comeback

A recording artist retires and marries, divorces and returns to the studio.

There all manner of vicissitudes attend him, some of which are worked out in House of the Long Shadows.

The allusion to Hitchcock’s Psycho was deprecated by Time Out Film Guide, all it could determine from the complex composition.

Home Before Midnight

He writes lyrics, a lucrative profession in a thriving industry. She is sweet and twenty, well into their love affair he accidentally discovers she is not yet fifteen.

“There is a notice of the mind and there is a notice of the heart. The first is nothing. And the heart is cold.”

Glenville’s Term of Trial has a measure of this, Donner’s Twinky (Lola) another.

His sentence is two years’ imprisonment.

House of the Long Shadows

The author’s travails, or Seven Keys to Bllyddpaetwr.

Biggers & Cohan ace the lot.

Out of his obscurity emerges the artist, much put upon of course.

All fiction, but there is a real key.

Time Out Film Guide had no idea, which generally seems to have been the case with English critics.